Cool Beans
by Zath Chauvert
Summary: A young woman finds herself participating in the latest entry into the "fictional character dies and is transported to modern Earth" genre of fanfic. There's just one little problem that keeps things from being the usual fangirl's dream come true.


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**Title: ** Cool Beans   
**Author: ** Zath Chauvert   
**Summary: ** A young woman finds herself participating in the latest entry into the "fictional character dies and is transported to modern Earth" genre of fanfic. There's just one little problem that keeps things from being the usual fangirl's dream come true.   
**Rating: ** PG   
**Feedback: ** Yes, please! Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated. Anything you have to say can be sent to "zathita AT hotmail DOT com", using common sense to put the "@" and the "." in their proper places, of course. Also, please include "FIC-FEEDBACK" somewhere in the subject line, because I get tons of spam and this makes the worthwhile stuff easier to pick out of the heap. :) Or, you could just hit the Review button at the bottom of the page.   
**Disclaimer: ** I do not own the rights to Lord Of The Rings in any of its various versions and incarnations. This piece was written for fun, not profit. 

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**Cool Beans**   
By Zath Chauvert 

Groaning from the very depths of her soul, Melody tossed her backpack onto the slightly rickety table, collapsed into the nearest chair, and buried her face in her hands. She did not notice that she was absolutely saturated from the sudden freak storm that had sprung up halfway into her walk home. She did not notice that rainwater was dripping from her sodden clothes and soaking into the dark orange shag carpet. She was too busy wallowing in self-pity to even notice she had thrown her bag hard enough to send most of its contents, including her Fellowship Of The Ring DVD case flying out of its waterproof cavern of safety, across the table, and onto the slightly grimy and increasingly soggy floor. This lack of attention to her surroundings was probably a good thing, because if she _had_ noticed it then she would have been severely tempted to stomp on the offending movie until it was nothing more than little shiny fragments of plastic confetti. 

The DVD set was just the two-disc theatrical release rather than the four-disc extended edition, but that fact by itself should not have been enough to arouse such violent contempt from anyone other than the poor unfortunates who had bought the theatrical release DVDs simply because they did not know that a better edition would be available in the not too distant future. Melody did not fall into that category of people. No, her anger was fueled by circumstances much more personal than the usual irritation at falling victim to a marketing ploy. The truth was that this relatively innocent pair of DVDs was in danger of annihilation by size-6 Nike high top sneakers because the movie was the cause of the aforementioned self-pity. How could it have possibly caused such mental trauma? It did so by becoming the topic of a writing assignment with a fifteen page minimum, worth twenty-five percent of the total course grade, due this coming Monday. 

Three weeks ago, when her teacher had first made the announcement, it had seemed like the perfect assignment. The task sounded simple enough: pick a novel that had been adapted into a full-length motion picture, analyze both the narrative differences and the thematic differences between the two versions, and then explain whether or not the adaptation was successful, using concrete examples from both book and novel. Melody had been thrilled. She would get to spend hours and hours on end with some of her favorite fictional characters without having to feel guilty about wasting time! She would get to tell her mother that she couldn't go to little Jason's piano recital because she already had plans to sit around rereading the trilogy and having a Lord Of The Rings movie marathon! "No, Mom," she would get to say, "it's for _a class_!" She would finally get be able to show her deprived, uncultured roommates (all three of whom had somehow managed to never read or watch _anything_ that was even related to Tolkien) that the story was not "just another pointless fantasy with sissy elves and junk," nor was it even remotely close to being such a thing! 

Now here it was, three weeks later, and so far all Melody had gotten was pain, suffering, and one more reason to suspect that film school was really just a big fat waste of money. Sure, it had been fun at first. She had talked her roommates into watching The Fellowship Of The Ring and The Two Towers on DVD one night and all three girls had liked the movies enough to accompany her to see Return Of The King in the theater a few blocks off campus without her having to bribe them or even pay for their tickets for them. Unfortunately, she didn't realize the truth until it was too late. She hadn't helped create three new LotR-fans. Instead, she had created one semi-fan of LotR who hated her for also creating two shrieking Orlando Bloom fangirls! 

Melody quickly learned that it was impossible to try to work on her assignment in the comfort of their apartment without hearing "Eeeeeee!! Orli!!!" and "Aaaaahh!!! Leggy!!!!!" every five minutes. She was fairly certain that she was developing noticeable hearing loss in the upper registers from having to listen to the constant shrieking and squealing. Her only option other than working in the apartment was watching the movies on the old beaten-up machines in the audio/visual section of the school's main computer lab. The lab had horrible, buzzing, headache-inducing fluorescent lights and the world's most uncomfortable chairs, which always had her butt and lower back in agony within five minutes or less of sitting down, but she could at least hope that any damage these caused her would not be permanent. 

As if all that was not enough, Melody had also soon learned that the fastest, most surefire way to make yourself hate one of your favorite movies was to watch it again and again for the sole purpose of overanalyzing minor details until the entire movie has been analyzed to death. Once upon a time, she had looked forward to watching these movies in the same way that many people looked forward to a weeklong vacation at the beach. Now, she could hardly endure the mere thought of the that she would have to watch Fellowship Of The Ring at least once, possibly twice, more before she completed the final draft of her paper. There was no avoiding it. Her only consolation was that she had narrowed her topic so that she only had to repeatedly bludgeon herself with the first movie rather than the entire trilogy. Still, she knew that it would be months, if not years, before she would be able to even _think_ about willingly picking up anything Tolkien related. Not even her favorite fanfic stories could dispel her Middle-Earth-induced malaise. 

Melody was in a state of deep despair. She had had such high hopes for the assignment. She had been certain that nothing but good things could come of it, but it had quickly all gone to hell. She sat at the table with her head in her hands for a full five minutes without moving at all. Finally, she groaned again, then looked up at the contents of her backpack, which were naturally still lying where they had been strewn. The DVD case lay on top of the mess, looking almost smug in the fact that it had not been damaged by the fall. 

"Nasty hobbitses," she growled under her breath, faintly hissing on the sibilants. "We hates them." She had said this and other similar phrases many times over the years, having been introduced to Tolkien at a young enough age for such things to easily work their way into her vocabulary. Usually such mutterings were a joke, or at least for ironic effect. This was the first time that she had actually meant them. 

If Melody had been slightly less sleep deprived, she might have been able to follow the most logical course of reasoning through to the conclusion that only a single weekend lay between that moment and the paper's due date, so she was less than three days of being free of the whole blasted situation, and almost nothing could happen in that amount of time to make things worse than they already were. It is probably good that she didn't think these things, because though there was no way that she could have known it, she would have been lying to herself. In truth, the situation was going to go from bad to worse in less than thirty seconds. 

_Twenty-nine seconds._

Melody looked at the DVD case. 

_Twenty-eight seconds. _

Twenty-seven seconds. 

She rose from her seat and stooped to pick up her scattered belongings. She began ruthlessly stuffing papers and pencils back into the bag without regard for organization, or for neatness, or even for safety. 

_Seventeen seconds. _

Sixteen seconds. 

She reached for the DVD case. She picked it up. 

_Fourteen seconds._

There was a sudden flash of lightning, which was followed by a gunshot-like crash of thunder that shook the floor and rattled the windows before the lightning had even finished cutting its jagged path across the sky. The power immediately went out, leaving the apartment in darkness. Faint yells of annoyance could be heard through the walls as the other students in the building cried out their dismay at suddenly finding themselves without electricity. The yelling could have been worse, but not very many people were ever home on Friday evenings, especially not on Friday evenings when four of the most popular fraternities were having a competition to see who could throw the biggest and best party over on the other side of campus. 

_Thirteen seconds. _

Twelve seconds. 

Melody gave a laugh that was half tense and half disgusted. "If this was a fanfic," she announced to the empty room, "when the lights come back on, my favorite character would magically be sitting on the couch, waiting to teach me the true meaning of The Lord Of The Rings, like some dumb Christmas movie." 

The only sounds in the small apartment came from Melody's own breathing, the rain hitting the windows, and the continued rumbling of thunder from various distances. Nothing happened. 

_Four seconds. _

Three seconds. 

"Well c'mon, Boromir, where are you?!?" she yelled to the ceiling, which was lost in the darkness, just like everything else. 

_One second. _

Zero! 

From the other side of the previously empty room came the unmistakably fleshy '_thwomp!_' of a body hitting furniture. Melody froze, but once again she could only hear the rain, the thunder, and her own quickened breathing. The seconds continued to tick by. Melody held her breath, waiting, but nothing else seemed interested in happening. A minute passed, and Melody began to relax. She tried to convince herself that the sound had been from the clumsy guy who lived upstairs tripping over something in the dark. She had almost started to believe that she had not heard anything at all when an extraordinarily bright flash of lightning illuminated the room just long enough for her to glimpse the truth. 

"Oh, bloody hell!" 

**To be continued...**

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End file.
